The state-of-the-art, six-story, 74,000 square foot facility was dedicated December 2013 on the UH Mānoa campus.

“This building is about reliability, energy efficient, security and better housing of our physical assets and our support staff,” said David Lassner, the University of Hawaiʻi interim president.

At the center’s blessing ceremony, Lassner stressed the huge impact the $41 million center would have on UH students, faculty and staff statewide.

“This is where we will be housing our student information, our financial information, our personnel information and these are facilities that now don’t need to be duplicated on all of our campuses,” said Lassner.

The new facility frees up space on all campuses since the servers containing that information are now stored in a highly secured, 8,000 square foot data center on the facility’s second floor.

“We have card access, both to the building, but also to the data center and the rooms,” said Lassner. “And again, when this stuff is scattered all around the campus, you’re never quite sure who might have access to those rooms.”

The IT Operations Center on the second level of the building provides 24/7 proactive monitoring of all IT systems.

Top-notch security is just one of the IT center’s many benefits said Lassner. “The biggest impact on students will be the assurance of more reliable service for their online learning, student information systems, access to global resources, high performance computing to support innovation and research, data storage to support big data projects and the work we are doing on all of the disciplines, the scholarly work on all of the campuses.”

IT staff and offices from multiple locations are now housed in one central facility that includes an emergency situation room, training lab, digital media center and videoconference rooms. The office space is set up to foster cooperation and collaboration including a help desk where students, faculty and staff can walk-in, call or email.

The IT center is also state-of-the-art when it comes to energy efficiency, with an expected LEED silver certification, and includes three rooftop generators and battery storage for all the communications and information systems.

“So the devices and systems and services that are housed here are more likely to be available than anywhere else in the UH System through manmade and natural disasters,” said Lassner.

Basically, as the story explains, the facility is a major upgrade to the technical underpinnings that run the whole university system — this includes online services involving grades and tuition, distance learning, help desk, etc. As a student, the building may not seem to make a dramatic impact to your day-to-day work, but rest assured it is a big improvement!